Dancing the Carceral Creep: The Feminist Anti-Domestic Violence Movement and the Paradoxical Pursuit of Criminalization

October 4, 2016 @ 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

|Free

The UCI Initiative to End Family Violence (IEFV) Distinguished Lecture

Dancing the Carceral Creep: The Feminist Anti-Domestic Violence Movement and the Paradoxical Pursuit of Criminalization

featuring Mimi Kim, Ph.D.
Founder of Creative Interventions, Founding Member of INCITE!, and Assistant Professor, School of Social Work, California State University, Long Beach

Date: Tuesday, October 4, 2016Time: 5:30 – 7:00 p.m.Location: UC Irvine, Education Building (EDUC), Room 1131 (directions/parking)The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments available at 5:00 p.m. Parking is $10 in the Social Science Parking Structure.

This event is approved for 1.5 hours of Minimum Continuing Legal Education Credit by the State Bar of California. UC Irvine School of Law is a State Bar-approved MCLE provider.

The criminalization of violence against women over the past forty years represents both social movement success and the paradoxical alignment of feminism with increasingly punitive carceral policies. While critics of what is now known as carceral feminism locate the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 and its attachment to the Crime Bill as the watershed moment in the collaborative relationship between mainstream feminism and the carceral state, this research turns to the formative years of the “battered women’s movement” to gain insight into how and why early feminists turned so definitively to criminalization as a response to domestic violence. In this talk, Professor Kim uses historical interview and archival research on the formation of the first domestic violence victim witness program and the Community Coordinated Response to explain the process through which early social movement success targeting law enforcement led to the eventual subordination of the social movement to the carceral state. This focus on early institutional innovations and their effects upon a contested spatial relationship between civil society and the state serves as a launching point for further exploration of the contemporary social movement landscape and demands for alternative responses aligned with community-based, Transformative Justice and prison abolitionist visions and practices.

About Mimi Kim, Ph.D.

Mimi Kim is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach. She is a longtime advocate and activist in the anti-violence movement, a founding member of INCITE! and the founder of Creative Interventions, an organization established to create accessible models of community-based interventions to domestic and sexual violence alternative to criminalization. She is currently working on a California statewide initiative to build grassroots, community-based capacity to implement violence intervention options aligned with the principles of Transformative Justice. She is also co-editor of Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, a special issue of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order.